ESXi 7.0 and lower cost SAS/SATA RAID

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steehl

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Mar 30, 2021
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I am jumping into the VMWare world and have noticed that there is a ton of support for the cheaper LSI SAS SATA RAID cards in the 6.x series of ESX.

I'm in the process of building a standalone ESXi host under $1000 with RAID 1 and about 6TB of storage. Performance is not a major concern. Budget, power, footprint and noise are.

The HP Proliant Microserver Gen10 plus seems to be a good starting point, and then I was going to go with the cheap LSI SAS-SATA RAID cards out there but none are on the 7.x ESXi hardware compatibility list. The HPE H240n is on the list, however and is affordable.

Are there any sub $200 (used is fine) SAS SATA cards to recommend that might not be on the VMware compat list? Or any on the list in particular to look at, that would work in the microserver gen10?
 
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Propaganda

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Dec 6, 2017
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If you can hold off a few days, i am tracking down some drive speed issues i am having which may turn out to be h240 related. I will hopefully have more info next week.
 

steehl

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Mar 30, 2021
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Hey, so to answer your question, (great question to ask, by the way)

VWARE sucks balls! There. I said it.

They took out the support for older gen SAS2 cards, so now you have to use essentially, PCI-E 3.0 cards like the HP240 you mentioned, or SAS3008 cards, like the Dell HBA330 or the LSI 9300-8i.

This is of course, only for the newer 7.0 version. In 6.8, the SAS2 cards are all still supported :.)

I ranted about this and am frankly still mad at it. I was just telling a friend of mine that the SAS2 cards still have great life in them, and people use them extensively and are perfect still for HDD's and cold storage. No need to use a SAS3008 chipset on HDD's.

But alas, ESXI wants to shut out the whitebox builders. Go figure. We dont give them money anyways. So they dont really care about us.

So in summary, if you want to use 7.0, you would need a newer card, or the HP240 would work. You can also try the popular Adaptec cards, like the ASR-71605 or the newer ASR-8405, which uses PCI-E 3.0. The ASR-8805 also is about $200 bucks if you want 2 x SFF 8643 ports.

Or if you dont mind using a slightly older version of VMware, then any SAS2 chipset (SAS2008, SAS2308) will do.

Of note, the HP H240 is found fairly cheap on Ebay, under $30 bucks, so if you prefer, you can just go with that.

All the cards I mentioned are essentially Microsemi/Adaptec cards. Best bet if you want to go cheaply with newer 7.0 version, or grab yourself an LSI 3rd gen SAS3008 chipset card like the 9300-8i or the Dell HBA330 (or flash a H330 to an HBA330)

Hope that helps you my friend!
Agreed, this business decision to price out the hobbyist and home user may have longer term effects they are not accounting for. Seems obvious to me, but if I get super familiar with and understand their ecosystem in a home environment, you better believe I'll be more likely to suggest it in the enterprise.

Thanks for the recommendations on the cards. I'm going to try and make 7.x work unless I hit a wall.
 
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steehl

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Mar 30, 2021
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If you can hold off a few days, i am tracking down some drive speed issues i am having which may turn out to be h240 related. I will hopefully have more info next week.
I already snagged one. Once it arrives I'll be more than happy to help out with any troubleshooting. The install will be totally fresh with no existing VMs, so I can blow stuff away, try anything with no problem.
 

ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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I have 4 or so H240 raid cards - I've not used them as RAID drives but note I've had varying degrees of success in whitebox servers. I think I had to disable the ROM BIOS for the PCIE slot it was in to get it to work on a supermicro board. I also found the performance questionable at best - but to be fair that was in a VSAN test so might be unfair.
 

Propaganda

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Dec 6, 2017
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I already snagged one. Once it arrives I'll be more than happy to help out with any troubleshooting. The install will be totally fresh with no existing VMs, so I can blow stuff away, try anything with no problem.
My eventual goal is to use this in a VSAN setup but for now I was doing sanity checks on baremetal windows 10 and truenas. I found that the performance didn't seem correct. I have ordered some m1215 cards and new cables to compare performance with but will only have those next week. My other post for reference:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/hgst-husmm1640-typical-performance.32408/